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SQL Server Performance: Tuning Methods that Acutally Work

SQL Server Performance Tuning Starts With Measurement, Not Guesswork When application response times spike and CPU usage climbs, the first instinct is often to turn...
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Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

by | Aug 15, 2014 |

All PowerShell versions When you use Get-ChildItem to get a list of files, you may have noticed that the -Filter parameter occasionally returns more files than you’ve expected. Here is an example of this. This line does not just return files with a...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Testing UNC Paths

by | Apr 2, 2014 |

Test-Path can test whether or not a given file or folder exists. This works fine for paths that use a drive letter, but can fail with pure UNC paths. At its simplest, this should return $true, and it does (provided you did not disable your administrative shares):...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Exporting and Importing Credentials in PowerShell

by | Mar 28, 2014 |

Credential objects contain a username and a password. You can create them using Get-Credential, and then supply this object to any cmdlet that has the -Credential parameter. However, what do you do if you want your scripts to run without user intervention yet...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Use $PSScriptRoot to Load Resources

by | Feb 20, 2014 |

Beginning in PowerShell 3.0, there is a new automatic variable available called $PSScriptRoot. This variable previously was only available within modules. It always points to the folder the current script is located in (so it only starts to be useful once you actually...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Changing FireMonkey style at runtime

by | Nov 21, 2013 |

Last month Sarina DuPont blogged about loading custom FireMonkey styles on a mobile device at runtime ("How to load custom styles at runtime"). That's a very interesting approach to compile a custom style as a resource into the mobile app. This week...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Getting More Than 1000 Active Directory Results

by | Oct 29, 2013 |

By default, Active Directory returns only the first 1000 search results when you use an ADSISearcher. This is a security mechanism designed to prevent unspecific LDAP queries from causing domain controller load. If you do need all search results and know that it will...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Converting Binary SID to String SID

by | Oct 21, 2013 |

Converting SID from Binary to String Active Directory accounts contain the SID in binary form. To convert the byte array into a string representation, use a .NET function like this: # get current user $searcher =...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Converting Excel CSV to UTF8

by | Oct 3, 2013 |

When you export Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to CSV files, Excel by default saves CSV files in ANSI encoding. That's bad because special characters will break once you import the data into PowerShell using Import-Csv. Ensuring UTF-8 Encoding for CSV Files To make sure...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Enabling Visual Styles

by | Jul 23, 2013 |

When you use Windows Forms dialogs and windows, you may have noticed that they show differently, depending on whether you launched your script from within the ISE editor or from the powershell.exe console. This is because the ISE editor enables visual styles by...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Test Local User Account Credentials

by | Jul 10, 2013 |

Verifying a Local User Account Here is a snippet that verifies a local user account. Simply submit a username and a password. You get back either $true or $false: $username = 'Administrator' $password = 'P@ssw0rd' $computer = $env:COMPUTERNAME Add-Type -AssemblyName...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Using RegEx to Filter Files

by | Jul 7, 2013 |

Get-ChildItem supports basic wildcards, but it does not support the rich feature set of regular expressions. If you combine Get-ChildItem with Where-Object, you can easily add this functionality. Filtering DLL Files by Name Pattern in PowerShell This example lists all...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Finding User Account with WMI

by | May 24, 2013 |

WMI represents all kinds of physical and logical entities on your machine. It also has classes that represent user accounts which include both local and domain accounts. Retrieving the Currently Logged-On User This piece of code returns the user account of the...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Increase SQL Server Performance Using Multiple Files

by | Jan 2, 2013 |

By default, SQL Server databases are comprised of two files: the primary data file (or .mdf) and the log file (or .ldf). It is, however, possible to configure SQL Server databases to use additional files – which can be an effective means of increasing SQL Server...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Change Order of CSV Columns

by | Nov 5, 2012 |

If you have a CSV file and would like to change the order of columns, simply import it into PowerShell, use Select-Object to change the order, and then re-export the CSV file again! $Path = "c:\somepathtocsv.csv" (Import-CSV -Path $Path) | Select-Object -Property...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Check Windows License Status

by | Oct 17, 2012 |

In a previous tip we explained how you can use slmgr, a built-in VBScript, to check Windows licensing state. Accessing the Raw Licensing Data in PowerShell The core information used by this VBScript actually comes from WMI, so in PowerShell, you can directly access...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Tips for Optimizing XML in SQL Server

by | Sep 5, 2012 |

I’ve worked on a project that used XML heavily inside SQL Server. We really utilized SQL Server’s XML support almost to the full extent, but with some repercussions. As we did our load testing, performance did degrade and we had to step back and adjust how...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Stripping Decimals Without Rounding

by | Feb 10, 2012 |

Extracting the Integer Part of a Division Result When you divide numbers and just want the decimals before the decimal point, you could cast the result to integer. However, this would also round the result: PS> 18 / 5 3.6 PS> [Int](18/5) 4 Removing Decimals...

Getting Files with Specific Extensions Only

Removing Multiple White Spaces

by | Feb 2, 2012 |

Removing multiple white spaces from text is easy in PowerShell. -replace operator Simply use -replace operator and look for whitespaces ("\s") that occur one or more time ("+"), then replace them all with just one whitespace: PS> '[ Man, it works! ]' -replace...